In her article, Sandra compares job searches in the UK, USA and Australia. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, she points out that January is a busy month for job search terms on the Web. Using her Hitwise data, she goes on to break out the top 200 job search terms by type and market.

Although the majority of the Australian search terms meant little to me, I did a double-take when I spotted our website address (URL) amongst them:

Top 10 Australian search variations on jobs by type Weeks ending 12th January 2008

seek jobs

smart jobs

reliefweb jobs

jobs jobs jobs

hippo jobs

search 4 jobs

jobs.ac.uk

jobs.com.au

monster jobs

seek jobs sa

Once I’d read the list, I checked out our traffic figures to see how many visits we get from Australia.

Sure enough, unique visitors from ‘the lucky country’ are in our own Top 10 – usually coming in between 8 or 9th as a percentage of visitors from overseas.

‘Bonza!’ as the Aussies say.

Although they regularly beat us Brits at cricket and rugby…and most other sports come to think of it…I like the Aussies. They’re known for their self-confidence, ‘can do’ attitude and sense of humour.

I like them even more now that I know they’re looking for jobs on jobs.ac.uk 🙂

What can you learn from these results?

Before I pull on my ”I love Oz!’ t-shirt, there’s a nugget of information for you here, too.

Notice in the list above, how people search for jobs.

Yes, they’re using generic and rather blunt terms such as ‘jobs’ or, to be on the safe side, ‘jobs jobs jobs’! But they’re also using URLs as search terms.

Or, in other words, they’re typing a website address INTO the search box of a search engine (Sandra doesn’t list which search engines but Google is dominate in search in Australia).

What’s fascinating and slightly odd, is that, instead of typing the URL into the address bar of their browsers (the space at the very top of your screen) jobseekers are using the text field on a search engine page – Google’s probably – instead!

Your jobseekers rely on search engines

Now, this may be because some folk think that Google – and the other search engines – are the World Wide Web. Which is inaccurate because none of the search engines have yet crawled the entire Interweb.

Or is it because we’re becoming so search dominant that people prefer to start their online activities through the interface of a keyword search?

Or, perhaps, it feels more natural to enter the ‘name’ of a site into that invitingly empty, virgin-white space of a search box?